The Nomadic Alternative – Page 122

She saw her true husband's cousin. "I prefer the Nemadi's sandals to the amir's arms", she said to her captor. To his credit he let her go.

Some years ago a European anthropologist hunted with this band, and when I spoke of him they all reacted at once. "His son is one of ours", they laughed and called his name. A lithe boy, quite naked, came through the scrub with his dog, and snuggled close to his mother. Her husband, his foster father, patted him gently. His head was shaved at the sides and a crest of hair stood up like a cockscomb. This is the fashion in the Western Sahara, but one could tell he was half-European.

The local governor had told me there are only about two or three hundred Nemadi scattered over a vast area, and once a population declines below a certain level, it is usually doomed to extinction as an entity. But I doubt if they have ever been much more numerous. They keep their numbers low on purpose, since more would imperil their freedom of movement. But the smallness of such bands would not prevent the long-term effects of inbreeding. No self-respecting woman from outside would join the Nemadi, and no man would bring fresh 'blood' unless he himself were an outcast. And this is why they offer their girls to the passing stranger.

The "desolate ones", the "hounds of the wilderness", "kafir-kind", "ignorant irreligious thieves" - like Esau - the hunters lost their birthright to the nomad and settler and the Old Testament pulled down a barrier of silence on them. Fishing, the other pariah occupation, gets no mention either. Yet one day a wild man and eater of 'vile worms' strode out of the deserts of Transjordania, where the Solubba hunted till recently - "The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the Way of the Lord, Make his Paths straight". And his cousin, the promised Messiah, was the son of an unmarried mother.

I do not suggest that Joseph and Mary were necessarily hunters or that the visitation marked the passing of an unknown stranger. But given the caste structure of Ancient Palestine and the evidence